Christian Staerklé / Co-PI

Christian Staerklé is Associate Professor of social psychology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and docent of social psychology at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He received his PhD in Psychology at the University of Geneva in 1999, followed by a post-doctoral stay at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research is based on a societal and political vision of social psychology in which intergroup and social justice approaches are integrated with social representations theory. Using survey, experimental and qualitative methods, his research studies opinion formation in the domains of social welfare, social control, institutional legitimacy and multiculturalism, both from a comparative perspective and within countries. He also investigates national and ethnic identities in a cross-cultural context and life course transitions in various youth populations in Switzerland. Staerklé has obtained research funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Science Foundation and has been member of the Question Design Team for the Welfare attitudes module in the European Social Survey 4. Staerklé is co-director of the social psychology graduate school of the universities of Geneva and Lausanne. He has widely published in international journals and edited books and is currently associate editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology.